I'm Kate Brown. I blog about triathlon, tech, startups, and generally bad-ass renegade people who make the world better.

Community

02/28/2010

I just wrote this for the "About Me" section on my DailyBurn profile. I think that most people would hesitate to put such a long-winded, non-SEO friendly post on their profile - especially people involved in curating a community of hundreds of thousands of users. I mean, I talk about my mom for most of this post. But I know I am not crazy for doing this. I am real. The users are real. I even hate using the word "users" to describe people that I interact with on the web. "Real-ness" wins out everytime. The web is changing. People don't respond to "bots" who pump out seo linkbait shit. They want real. So here you go:

"About Me"

Long Version: I'm a techie triathlete living the dream in Colorado. I
split my time between Denver and Boulder. I was born and raised in
Maine and grew up fishing, gardening, and riding my bike everyday to
elementary school.

I love my mom because she never let me quit any
after school sport - even when I was last in the 1600m race (every
time), only scored 2 points in my 2 year basketball career, and stared
up at the clouds in the outfield during softball games while the ball
rolled right past me. I am not a natural athlete, I'm a nerd. But my
mom taught me to appreciate an active lifestyle by making food and
fitness fun. For example, she would have my sister and I picking
rhubarb in our grandmother's yard and a few short hours later, we would
be eating delicious strawberry rhubarb pie. Manual labor is fun when
you know that pie is on the way. She also instilled in me my "never say
die" attitude (although I really really really wanted to quit
softball). Now my mom comes to most of my races.

I spent a few years
after high school living in the East Village of Manhattan. I started
smoking because I was going to school to be a journalist and I thought
all hardcore journalists smoked. Although the farmers market in Union
Square was top notch, I missed the quit times and hiking trails of New
England. I quit smoking. I moved home.

In Portland, ME I began working
in the specialty food and beverage industry - first at a specialty
coffee roaster/retailer and then in the wine industry. I got to meet
some of the best chefs/brewers/bakers/organic farmers in the US. I
would spend my entire paycheck on vintage cookbooks, local produce,
imported specialty ingredients, prime cuts of meat and lobster fresh
off the boat at the Portland docks. I taught myself to cook and I went
out to the best restaurants in the city regularly just to taste the
work of the chefs that I admired so greatly. I spent my days off
reading Michael Pollan's work and Alice Waters' cookbooks. I
obsessively did that for an entire year, and it was an investment in
time/$ that I will never regret. That year informed my personal stance
on food public policy and sustainable food systems.

In the middle of
all that, I met a crazy guy from Wisconsin with the nickname "Waz" who
was training for a triathlon called Ironman Wisconsin while his wife
was an intern at Maine Medical Center. She was never at home, so he
figured, as he told me, "Why not, I need something to do to pass the
time". So I got a bike and started riding with him. I signed up for a
sprint triathlon just to see if I could do it before I could even swim
a full lap in a pool. I trained for 8 months while working 70 hr weeks
and then I raced in my first triathlon. I was hooked and I haven't
looked back. I will be completing my first half-Ironman this summer,
and I hope to get my Level 1 USA Triathlon Coach Cert. next year. My
current training interests include core workouts, weight training for
endurance athletes, and low impact / recovery training.

I'm telling you
all of this because I am a real person who believes that anyone can get
in shape, get healthy, be happy, and have fun while doing it. Big,
little, short, young, big, old, it doesn't matter. We all need to take
care of both ourselves and each other. I would love to be your
motivator while you are on this site.